The Malevolent Land of Oz
They said it was just going to rain.
The
thought played over and over again at the back of Natalie Wolf’s mind like a broken
record in the other room. She swerved
around a large branch that had fallen into the road, gripping the steering wheel
of her car with white knuckled fingers.
They
said it was just going to rain.
The
rain pelted down from grey-green clouds, driven almost horizontally by the
howling wind. Natalie could barely keep
her little car in her lane; the winds buffeted it one way then the other.
Natalie
started at a sudden noise from the seat beside her, her already pounding heart
skipping along a little faster for three beats.
She tried to laugh at herself when she realized it was just her phone,
but the sound died before it was fully formed.
She reached across and grabbed her drawstring bag from the passenger
seat, fumbling to get it open with one hand.
She managed to get it open, and tangle her arm in the strap in the
process. She found her phone and looked
down at the screen.
Text from Aunt Emily.
Natalie
glanced back at the road, then looked at the phone again.
‘Where
are you?’
I don’t know, she
thought, biting her lip. The last she
knew, she was still a half an hour’s drive from her cousins’ house. Then the storm started and she’d had to slow
to a twenty-five miles per hour pace just to stay on the road.
She
started to reply. ‘Still 20 ? min awa…’
Natalie
stomped her brakes and skidded to a stop.
No, she thought. She threw open the car door and scrambled out,
staring in wide-eyed horror at the horizon.
The wind whipped her hair into her eyes, but that didn’t obscure her
view of the spinning funnel of clouds dipping down to touch the ground a few
hundred yards in front of her.
The
cyclone was tinted green and blue and the air started to crack with
electricity. Panic rose in Natalie’s
chest and she turned and ran toward the side of the road. She slid into a muddy ditch and flattened
herself against the ground, covering her head with her arms.
They
said it was just going to rain.
. . .
“Catchin’
up to him,” Felix muttered as he crouched to study the tracks in the dirt.
Toodles
knelt beside the older boy, so he could look at the prints too. “He’s big,” he said, holding his hand above
the clearest track and spreading his fingers.
The beast’s foot must be three times the size of his hand.
“Yes,
and he’s going to make a lovely wall decoration.” Peter Pan studied the track over their
shoulders, then turned his gaze to the trees in from of them. He grinned over his shoulder at the six Lost
Boys that formed the hunting party.
“Get ready boys. The fun’s about
to begin.”
Toodles
stood, gripping his cross bow tighter, and moved along with the others. The group had started out after the lion early
that morning, tracking it through the Dark Forest. Toodles wasn’t sure how long they’d been
hunting it, it was always black as night in these woods, but he guess by how
hungry he was getting that it must be late afternoon.
He’d
hunted lions before, but this one was a monster. Pan said it was possibly the biggest to ever
be seen in Neverland. Several of the
other boys had seen it and they all attested to its size and ferocity. He looked ahead at George and Felix, several
yards in front of the group, doing most of the tracking. Both carried a net, George held a loaded
crossbow and Felix had his club resting at its usual place over his right
shoulder. The thought of facing any
sized lion with nothing but a club and a buck bone knife made Toodles’ mouth go
dry, but Felix never carried any other weapons.
After
a few minutes more, George held up his hand and the others stopped. Toodles thought he heard something moving
ahead of them.
“Here
we go boys,” Pan whispered, an excited glint in his eyes. “Ivan, you move in with Felix and
George. Jesse, you move in from behind
it. The rest of you,” he gestured with
his spear, “try to circle around it.”
Ivan,
who carried a torch along with a spear, moved to stand by Felix and George
while the others fanned out into the trees.
Toodles was sure he could hear something now; a low rumble, fading and
coming back at regular intervals.
Attack the lion, fight with it for
a few minutes, it runs off.
Pan
cocked his head and stared in the direction the beast had run off in with a
puzzled expression. It wasn’t like
Neverland lions to just run away. Not
before they’d drawn a fair amount of blood anyway.
All
of a sudden the air around them seemed to hold something threatening. Toodles
shuddered. It wasn’t them the lion was
running from. There was something else. The other boys must have felt it too; they
all started glancing around at the trees, holding their weapons ready. Feeling the hair on the back of his neck
stand up, Toodles took an involuntary step or two toward Felix as he fitted
another arrow to his crossbow.
Then,
the ground beneath their feet opened up into a green and black hole. Toodles tried to scramble back, tried to grab
hold of something but his free hand only met with the corner of Felix’s
cloak. That was no help; the other boy
was falling too. Dimly he heard the
shouts of the rest of the hunting party before the whirling vortex swallowed him.
